Niko's Project Corner

JGit blame for fun and profit(?)

Soft­ware pro­jects are typ­ically "tracked" on a ver­sion con­trol sys­tem (VCS). Each "ver­sion" of the code is called a "com­mit", which does not only store file con­tents, but also plenty of meta­data. This cre­ates a very rich set of data, and in the age of open source there are thou­sands of pro­jects to study. A few ex­am­ples are Git of The­seus and Gi­ten­tial, but by fo­cus­ing on "git blame" (see who has com­mit­ted each line on each file) I hope to bring some­thing new to the table. In short I have an­alyzed how source code gets re­placed by newer code, track­ing the top­ics of who, when and why, and how old the code was.